A blog about science fiction and fantasy novels, films and related matters

Sunday, 23 April 2017

Fantasy assortment

Three different novels this time, with nothing connecting them except that they all fall (more or less) into the fantasy genre:

Three, by Sarah Lotz:

Four passenger planes, in the USA, Europe, Japan, and South
Africa, crash almost simultaneously. There are no survivors, except for one
young child from each of three of the planes – survivals which seem
inexplicable given the devastating nature of the crashes. An adult on one of
the planes lives just long enough to leave an ambiguous but chilling message on
her phone – apparently about the surviving child. And the children are changed;
they have become far more knowing than children of that age should be. The
debate soon rages – are they changelings of some kind? Aliens? Harbingers of
the Apocalypse?

Sarah Lotz's novel follows in detail the lives of various
characters connected with the children as they struggle to understand what has
happened to them, under the intense scrutiny of the media and with religion and
politics becoming increasingly involved.

The story is told by an author, Elspeth Martins, who has
written a book about the three survivors – a book which forms the greater part
of Three. It consists of a series of
interviews with the characters, news reports and other sources, occasionally
interspersed with (and concluding with) sections in which Martins follows up
the consequences of having written her story.

This is an unusual tale, rather slow-paced because of the
considerable detail concerning the lives of the characters. It remained
intriguing enough to hold my attention, but I'm unlikely to want to read it
again.

***************************

Silverheart – a novel
of the multiverse, by Michael Moorcock and Storm Constantine:

This fantasy has a richly baroque feel, being set in the
legendary, ancient, somewhat decrepit and apparently isolated twin city of
Karadur/Shriltasi, in which the two parts are separated by being located in
different branches of the multiverse. Travel between the cities is possible, but
only a few know how. The social structure of Karadur (where nearly all of the
initial action is set) is based on clans led by hereditary lords, each
specialising in a different metal; with Iron, Copper, Gold and Silver being the
four most important. Stirring up trouble in this ossified society is Max
Silverskin, a talented young thief who decides to steal a huge diamond which is
the symbol of the city – and possibly rather more. Meanwhile, the strange
people of Shriltasi seem to have their own agenda, but it is unclear what it
is.

All of this sounds intriguing, but for some reason I was
never fully engaged. Perhaps it was trying too hard to be different and
bizarre, but I found myself increasingly uninterested in picking up the book
and continuing with it, so I finally bailed out after getting almost a third of
the way through.

***************************

Chronicles of Empire:
Gathering, by Brian G Turner:

This newly published book is, from its title, clearly
intended to be the first of a series. The second half of the title also
suggests that this might be a quest type of story in the Tolkien tradition,
with an assorted group of adventurers gathering together before setting off to
fulfil some vital task. This is indeed more or less what happens, although the
group members arrive in an unplanned fashion at different times. While the
medievalesque setting is conventional enough, pairing it with time travel from
a very distant future is less common, giving the tale a flavour of SF as well
as fantasy. There is no magic here, only some (very) advanced science which, as
has been pointed out before, might be argued to be more or less the same thing
depending on your viewpoint.

The author has apparently being working on this concept for
a long time, planning the story arc over a whole series with Gathering seen as merely the first
volume. There is a problem with this, however, in that the story develops
slowly; the first really exciting action scenes which gripped this reader did
not occur until about a third of the way through. After that, the pacing is
fine, but I nearly didn't get that far. There are a couple of other
consequences of taking such a long view of the plot: the purpose of the quest
is never made clear, nor is the identity or motivation of the principal
character that obvious (hints are dropped, but nothing more). To return to
Tolkien comparisons, for all of the variety in its characters and events, there
is never any doubt from very early in The
Lord of the Rings that the principal character is Frodo and that the
purpose of the quest is to put the magical ring out of Sauron's reach.Such clarity is missing from Gathering, which appears somewhat
inchoate in consequence.

I would also have liked to understand more about the
setting: the geography and politics of the world, subjects which are mentioned
frequently but never in a way which allowed this reader to get a firm grasp of
the overall picture. The author undoubtedly knows exactly what is going on and
how everything fits together, but he doesn't always make that clear; and at the
end of the book I was still trying to sort out which characters belonged to
which factions, and what each faction stood for. This is always a problem in
creating new worlds: you don't want to slow down the action by putting in too
many infodumps about the setting, but you have to give the reader enough to
understand what is happening. Some writers get around this by including an
explanatory prologue or appendix, or just extracts from a fictional
encyclopedia (or some such) at the start of each chapter.

Once you get into it, this story is engaging and it might
well be the start of a worthwhile epic. But as the first volume of a series,
this should do more than just introduce the characters and include some initial
action; it also needs to capture the reader, by working as a stand-alone novel while
being tantalising about what happens next – which means providing more clues as to
what the series is all about, and hitting the ground running, not strolling.

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Welcome to the SFF blog

I started this blog in order to post reviews and comments on Science Fiction and Fantasy (mostly books or films, but occasionally on more general issues such as publishing and marketing), and of course to alert those readers not yet aware of the delights which lie in store within the covers of my own novels...see below.

This remains the main purpose of this blog, but topics may also cover non-fiction issues which may be of interest to SFF enthusiasts. Longer articles, mostly taken from earlier blog posts, are listed below, along with a full index of all book, TV and film reviews.

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Anthony G Williams

Scales

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The Foresight War

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